This is the eleventh part of my Reflection Series for 2017 – a self-reflection of my teaching this year.

In what ways were you helpful to your colleagues this year?

In lots of ways I hope!

This is always a difficult question to answer, because it requires you to really look at what you did throughout the year for your colleagues. It’s much easier to look at what you did for your students, or even for yourself!

Pre-Service Teachers

I think one thing I did that was helpful was mentoring three pre-service teachers. I won’t re-hash what I wrote there, so jump on over and take a look.

I think teaching should be more like an apprenticeship than a course-work degree – you always learn infinitely more while shadowing a mentor teacher than you do in a university classroom.

I also know that a lot of teachers don’t like to have someone shadow them – we are always told how desperate the universities are to place pre-service teachers with mentors.

Hopefully by taking three in 2017 I was helpful to at least one of them!

Curriculum Design and Resources

While this is technically going to be more helpful to my colleagues this year, I feel like it’s important to take note of it here. In case you missed that post, I re-designed our entire year 8 science curriculum and resources for 2018.

It came about through little bits and pieces of improvement I made throughout the year to the version we were using in 2017, and I know at least some of my colleagues were thankful for and liked the changes I made as we went. Things like re-designing poor assessment items.

I also brought along resources, skills, and knowledge from my time spent in London and the private school – others used these, so I know they were helpful!

Being Pregnant

This might sound like a very odd one, but I know I brought a nice bright spark to some of my colleagues purely because I was pregnant. They enjoyed watching my transformation and sharing stories from their own lives.

It was fantastic to hear about the human side of pregnancy and parenting from fellow teachers. So much advice and care was given, and I know I can go back to any of them with questions any time I might have them.

How were you helpful to your colleagues? Were they in traditional ways, or something a bit less usual?

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